Chapter 52: After

AFTER

As the taxi draws up outside Hugh’s flat, Hannah gets her phone out to pay. To her dismay, the inky shadow inching across the screen has spread. It’s now covering almost the whole screen, leaving only a small triangle at the top left.

However, she holds it against the card reader, mentally crosses her fingers, and sighs with relief as it beeps obediently.

“Good luck, hen,” the taxi driver says gently. “You need a lift anywhere, you give me a call, ken?” He pushes a business card through the hole in the plexiglass screen, and Hannah takes it, trying to smile. Now that the adrenaline is wearing off she feels almost unbearably shaky; her hands are trembling and cold. “And dinna you be in too much of a hurry to go back tae him. Leave him to stew in his own juices a wee while.”

Hannah nods.

“Thank you,” she says, and then she takes a deep breath and slides out of the back seat.

Standing in front of Hugh’s intimidating brass bell plate, she reflects that she should have called ahead. If Hugh is out, she will be in a fix. But it’s… She glances at her phone, and then realizes that it’s pointless, the clock is no longer visible. It must be before nine, though. It’s not likely a single, childless man like Hugh would be up and out so early on a Sunday. Saturday he sometimes does clinics, she knows that. Hugh’s wealthy clients don’t expect to have to stick to weekdays for their appointments. But not Sundays. Sundays are his days off.

She presses the brass button beside the engraved H. BLAND and waits.

After what feels like an agonizingly long time, her feet getting slowly colder and more numb on the black-and-white tiles of the porch, the intercom crackles and Hugh’s very English voice comes over the speaker.

“Hello?”

“Hugh?” Her teeth are chattering now. “It’s m-me, Hannah. C-can I c-c-come in?”

“Hannah?” Hugh sounds astonished. “I mean—yes, of course. But what—”

“I’ll t-tell you ups-s-stairs,” Hannah says. She can hardly get the words out. Somehow the brief interlude of warmth in the taxi has only made the shock of the outside feel worse now that she is stuck here. A chill wind whips down the road, swirling dead leaves in the porch and making her shudder afresh.

“Oh, yes, sure. I mean of course. I’ll buzz you in. Fifth floor, yes?”

“I remember,” Hannah says. She has her arms wrapped around herself, her teeth clenched to stop the chattering.

There is a drawn-out bzzzzzzz and Hannah shoves the door with a force that sends it swinging inwards to bang against a backstop, and hurries into the hallway of Hugh’s building.

Inside it’s not exactly warm, but it’s a hell of a lot warmer than the street, and she presses the button for the tiny old-fashioned lift with its folding screen door, and waits while it clanks down the stairwell. As it rises up to Hugh’s flat she has to fight the urge to sink to her knees, cradling her bump, howling with the awfulness of what has just happened—an awfulness she is only now beginning to comprehend. And Hugh—Hugh tried to tell her. That’s the worst of it. He tried to warn her what would happen if she kept pushing and digging and refusing to accept the version of events they had all learned to live with. He tried to tell her and she ignored him, and now she is paying the price.

When the lift stops with a clang at the fifth floor, Hugh is standing outside, wearing a paisley silk dressing gown and holding a cup of coffee. He isn’t wearing his glasses, which gives his face an oddly unfinished, vulnerable look. But as Hannah pulls back the folding brass grille, his expression changes from one of puzzled welcome to a kind of confused dismay.

“What the—Hannah old bean, what happened? Where are your shoes? And is that… is that blood?”

Hannah looks down. It’s true. Her feet are bleeding and she hadn’t even noticed. She has no idea whether she’s picked up a piece of glass or just stubbed her toe on the rough asphalt, but there are smears of red on the checkerboard tiled floor of the lift.

“Oh shit, Hugh, I’m so sorry—”

She bends, trying to reach past her bump in the confined space, but Hugh is shaking his head. He takes her arm firmly, pulling her forcibly upright and propelling her down the corridor towards the open door of his flat with a firm but kindly hand in between her shoulders.

“Absolutely not. You, get yourself inside. I’ll call housekeeping to deal with that.”

“But your carpets—” Hannah stops in the entrance to the flat. She had forgotten Hugh’s carpets—a pristine cream expanse that runs the length of the enormous hallway and stairs. Hugh rolls his eyes as if to say damn the carpets, but he pauses and opens a cupboard concealed behind paneling, bringing out a pair of slippers.

“There you go. Put those on if it’s only going to make you fret. Now for God’s sake, sit down before you fall down. What on earth happened?”

“It was Will,” Hannah finds herself saying, but to her horror, the rest of the words won’t come. Instead there are tears crowding at the back of her throat, forcing their way up, prickling out through her eyes and running down the sides of her nose. A great, ugly sob comes out with no warning, and then another, and suddenly she is racked with them—huge, unmanageable, body-convulsing sobs that feel like they are going to tear her apart.

“Oh, Han, no,” Hugh says uncomfortably, and then he holds out his arms, awkwardly, and almost in spite of herself Hannah stumbles into them. Hugh is not one of nature’s huggers. He is too tall and bony to be comfortable, too physically ungainly. But he is good, and kind, and he is Hugh. They stand, locked together in Hugh’s hallway, Hannah’s bump intruding uncomfortably between them, and she bawls like a child into the embroidered silk lapel of Hugh’s dressing gown.

At last her sobs subside into gasps, and then hiccups, and then finally just shuddering breaths, and she gets a hold of herself and pulls away. As she wipes her eyes, and then her glasses, she realizes with a kind of shameful horror that she has slobbered all over what is probably a very expensive dry-clean-only garment.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Her voice is croaky. “I didn’t mean—oh God, your beautiful dressing gown. I’m so sorry, Hugh.” She sniffs and gulps. “Have you got a tissue?”

“Here,” Hugh says. She’s not sure where it came from, but he’s holding out a laundered linen square with HAB on one corner. Hannah looks at it doubtfully. Handkerchiefs in her house are made of paper. But at last she blows her nose and then, unsure what to do with it—she can hardly hand it back to Hugh—she puts it in her pocket, intending to slip it into the laundry hamper when she goes to the bathroom.

“Better?” Hugh says, and she nods. It’s both true and untrue. She needed that cry, badly, and she does feel better. It was cathartic in a way no talk could ever have been. But in another way, nothing is better. It’s just as awful and fucked up and unfixable as it was when she walked through the door to Hugh’s flat.

“Come into the living room, sit down,” Hugh says, “and then I’ll make you a cup of tea, and you can tell me all about it.”

---

SOME HALF HOUR LATER, HANNAHis sitting on Hugh’s white velvet couch, with her slippered feet tucked under her and a blanket around her legs, and Hugh has his head in his hands.

“So he admitted it?” he asks now, as if he can’t believe it. “He actually said he killed April?”

“Not in so many words,” Hannah says. The sentences feel unreal in her mouth. “But I asked him, and he said—” She stops, gulps, and forces herself on. “He said ‘What do you think?’ And then he laughed.”

“Oh my God,” Hugh says wretchedly. He looks up at Hannah, his face utterly bleak.

“I wish—God, I almost wish I’d never told you about the noises.”

Hannah shakes her head.

“Hugh, no. God, no. If it’s true—” But she stops at that. She can’t bring herself to say it. “Hugh,” she asks instead, knowing she is clutching at straws, “Hugh, was it definitely him? It couldn’t have been a scout or sound traveling through the walls or something?”

But Hugh shakes his head. He looks ten years older, as if he is still coming to terms with what he set in motion.

“No,” he whispers now. “It—it was him, Hannah. I heard him, through the wall, speaking to someone. It was Will.”

Hannah feels her last shred of hope snap. She feels as if she has been hanging on to a fraying rope for dear life, and that last fiber has just been severed.

He was there. He was really there. And he has lied about it for more than ten years—for the entirety of their relationship.

“Why didn’t you say anything before?” she manages. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” She doesn’t mean it to sound as accusing as it comes out, but Hugh only shakes his head wretchedly, as if accepting any blame she wants to throw at him.

“Because he was my friend, Hannah.” He sounds broken. “And because I didn’t think it mattered. It was Neville—you saw him coming out of the staircase, we both did. There was no way anyone could have got up there between Neville leaving and us arriving—so did it really matter if Will arrived a few hours before he said he did? And besides, no one asked. They never said, Did you hear your best friend coming home at a time that totally breaks his alibi? I would never have lied outright, Hannah, never. But to go to the police with that—when we all thought Neville was guilty…”

He stops, takes off his glasses, covers his face. It must, Hannah reflects dazedly, be almost as much of a shock for him as it is for her. She has lost her husband. Hugh has lost his best friend.

She feels the tears welling up again, and grits her teeth. She can’t keep bursting into sobs. She has to get a grip.

They have to figure out what to do.

“He didn’t try to stop you leaving?” Hugh asks.

“He did,” Hannah says. She almost can’t believe it herself. “He—he ran after me. But he tripped over the table. I don’t know what would have happened if he’d caught up with me.”

A picture comes to her. Will’s lean, strong hands wrapped around April’s throat—

The image washes over her with a physical shock like ice water, making her cheeks flare and her breath quicken.

She pushes the thought away. She can’t think about that right now. About the reality of what this means. All she can do is put one foot in front of the other.

“Okay,” Hugh says now. He stands and paces to the end of the living room, to the beautiful floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the street. He runs his hand through his hair. “Okay. Let’s think. Let’s think about what to do. Did Will know you were coming here?”

Hannah shakes her head.

“No.”

“And what about your phone—is there any way he could be tracking you? You should turn off location services.”

“I can’t.” Hannah digs in her pocket and draws out her cracked and broken phone. The screen is completely dark now, ink-black and unreadable. “I broke it this morning. It’s completely dead. But I don’t think it’s a problem anyway. Will had no—” She swallows, takes a breath, tries again. “He had no reason to—”

She stops again. It’s extraordinarily hard to say what she means: her husband had no reason to spy on her until today.

She cannot believe she and Hugh are having this conversation.

All she wants is to hear Will’s voice, hear his incredulous laugh as he says What? Are you crazy? Of course I didn’t kill April. But instead what she hears is that cold, brutal What do you think?

She puts her head in her hands. November was right. She can’t handle this herself anymore. It has gone too far, become much too dangerous. Whatever the truth, she has to hand her fears over to the authorities. And although the thought of sharing her suspicions makes her feel sick, there’s a kind of relief too, in the idea of passing on this burden to someone else. For more than ten years she has been pushing away these doubts, pushing away the certainty that there was something wrong in what she saw that night. It’s time to confess.

“I think… I think I have to go to the police,” she says. “Can I use your phone, Hugh?”

“Of course,” Hugh says, though he looks as sick as she feels at the thought. “I’ll speak to them too if you want. But, look—if you phone them, they’ll probably want you to come down to the station, make a statement. Do you want to get cleaned up first? You look absolutely all in.”

Hannah looks down at herself—at her crumpled sweats and her bloody feet in Hugh’s borrowed slippers. She wants to phone the police—get this over with. But at the same time she can see that Hugh is right. Once she has started the ball rolling, she can hardly say I’ll be down in a few hours, once I’ve had a shower.

“Okay,” she says now. “Good idea.”

Her stomach growls audibly, and she realizes suddenly that she is almost faint with hunger.

“Actually, before I do that, could I—could I have some toast, Hugh?”

Hugh nods.

“Of course. Come through to the kitchen and I’ll get you set up.”

---

IT’S MAYBE HALF AN HOURlater that Hannah walks into Hugh’s palatial marble bathroom to see a steaming bubble bath awaiting her, already run.

The sight makes her do a double take. She had been intending a quick shower and then straight down to speak to the police—it must be already getting on for 10 a.m. But it seems pointless to drain the water in an already-run bath.

Setting the cup of tea to the side, she strips off her sweatpants, T-shirt, and underwear, steps out of Hugh’s borrowed slippers, and climbs gingerly into the warm water.

It’s unbelievably good. The foam is scented with some kind of spicy citrus-smelling perfume; the bubbles are rich and foamy. Even the painful stinging of her feet can’t take away from the fact that this is, undeniably, exactly what she needs. She closes her eyes and feels the tears she has been keeping at bay for the last hour prickle behind her lids. But she cannot—she can’t give way to this. She has to be strong—she has to get to the police and say what she knows, for April and November, who deserve justice after all this time, and for Neville, Ryan, Emily, everyone who has lived with this pall of potential guilt hanging over them.

She will be angry soon. She can feel it underneath, the searing, white-hot rage that will envelop her when this is done. How could you. She wants to shake Will, spit at him, slap him around the face.

And maybe that is what will save her from the despair.

As she lies in the bath she can picture it so clearly.

Will, coming back early from the weekend—climbing the wall behind Cloade’s to avoid having to go around the long way, through the main gate. And then, maybe preplanned, maybe just on a whim, he didn’t go back to his own room, but up to April’s.

Maybe it was open. She thinks she locked it on her way down to the bar, but a decade on, she can’t be sure. Or maybe April was already back, maybe she welcomed Will inside. See, I came back for you—you are more important to me than my mother.

And then… what? An argument? No, not an argument, or the boys below would have heard it. A hissed disagreement, maybe.

Or perhaps if Will was already in the room before April came back from the bar, he saw something. Another pregnancy test. A note from Ryan.

Perhaps he opened the door, smiling, pulled her in for a hug. Let me take off my makeup, she would have said. And so he let her wipe off the terra-cotta foundation. Perhaps it was then, as she bent over her dressing table, cotton wool in hand, that he came towards her, hands outstretched—

And then there was a knock on the door.

April would have known nothing, suspected nothing.

She would have pecked Will on the cheek and then gone to answer it.

From inside April’s room, Will would have heard the conversation. Neville handing over the parcel, April trying to hurry him away, Neville’s footsteps as he retreated down the stairs.

And then April, coming back into her room, all smiles.

“Got rid of him.”

And Will would have walked towards her, arms outstretched, but instead of cradling her face in his hands, as he has done so often to Hannah—and her heart cracks a little further as she thinks of it—he would have slid his hands down to her neck, and squeezed…

No, no, no! The revulsion is so strong that she has to sit up, holding on to the sides of the bath as the water sloshes back and forth. It doesn’t make sense, Will is not that person!

But then she thinks of all the articles she has read over the years, all of the it’s always the partner pieces, all of the statistics about women killed by the person they’re sleeping with. She thinks of Geraint’s euphemistic hints about a domestic murder, all the whispers she’s ignored for more than a decade. I never liked the boyfriend… They said she was sleeping around… He was never even a suspect. She has always ignored them, always clung to what she knows to be true—that Will is not that person.

But now, with the knowledge that he has spent their entire marriage lying to her about that night, she is not so sure.

The sudden movement of sitting up has made her head swim; there are little flashes of light, like paparazzi bulbs, flickering at the edges of her vision, the flashes the midwife warned her about. Was the bath too hot?

Don’t faint, don’t faint, don’t faint…

She is whispering the words aloud, and then the moment has passed, and she is okay.

Except she’s not. Her legs are weak as jelly, and when she tries to stand, she’s not sure if they will hold her.

Fuck. Fuck. Don’t do this, she wants to beg her body. Not now… please not now.

She holds her bump, feeling the baby move. It’s reassuring. However much her body is letting her down, it’s taking care of their child.

Theirchild. The word strikes to her heart. Because if this is true, if this is true, this baby will no longer be born to a father and a mother. It will be the child of a murderer. With a father in prison.

The faintness comes again, and this time it’s accompanied by a wash of nausea. She crouches, naked in the bath. Is it going to be okay?

And then suddenly it’s not, and she needs to get to the toilet right now. Trembling, she hauls herself out of the bath, wet and dripping, her legs shaking, and scrambles over the side, slipping on the wet tiles, to fall to her knees in front of the toilet, shivering with a mix of cold and shock.

She heaves, but nothing comes up.

For a few minutes she kneels there, shaking and dripping foamy water onto the beautiful geometric tiles, and then slowly, very slowly, she gets up and gropes her way to the towel rail. She has to hold on to the sink as she goes. She cannot slip and fall, not now. She is all this baby has.

She wraps herself in a towel and then slides down to the floor, her back to the heated rail, her gaze unfixed in front of her, waiting for the shivering to subside.

But it never does.

---

IT’S MAYBE AN HOUR LATERthat Hugh taps on the door.

“Hannah, are you okay? It’s gone very quiet.”

She doesn’t answer. Her teeth are chattering too much.

“Hannah?” Hugh is starting to sound alarmed. “Can you say something?”

He waits, then knocks again, and then says, “Hannah, I’m coming in. Is that all right?”

She wants to speak. She wants to tell him she’s okay, but it’s not true.

The door creaks slowly open, and Hugh’s head comes cautiously through the gap. He is wearing his glasses now, and has changed into herringbone trousers with a sharp crease ironed down the front.

His expression changes as he sees her huddled against the towel rail, white and speechless and shivering.

“Jesus, Hannah, you’re in shock. Let me help you up.”

She tries to stand, but her legs are weak as rubber, and Hugh has to help her, holding the towel around her to try to protect her nakedness, averting his eyes as it slips to expose her bump.

“I’m s-s-sorry—” she keeps trying to say, and he keeps saying “Don’t worry, don’t worry—Han, I’m a doctor, I’ve seen this all before, it’s okay, you’re in delayed shock. It’s completely natural, the news about Will—it would have shaken anyone up. Come through here. I’ll get you something hot and sugary. Come on, you’re okay. You’re okay.”

Together they make their hobbling way down the corridor to Hugh’s guest bedroom, and Hugh pulls back the covers and helps her slip underneath.

“Don’t go to sleep, okay?” Hugh says sternly. “I’m coming back with something for the shock.”

The shivering is subsiding, and she is hugely, unbelievably tired, but she tries to obey, dragging her lids open. Hugh returns in a matter of moments with a hot water bottle and a cup of tea so sweet it makes her want to retch as she drinks it, but he forces her to have at least a few sips.

“Let me sleep,” she begs at last. She can’t think of the police, not now, not like this, while she’s white and trembling. In an hour, maybe. Right now she is suddenly crushingly exhausted—tired in a way she can’t remember ever being before. Hugh looks at her for a long moment and then nods.

“All right. You look absolutely done in. I’m just going to take your blood pressure, okay?”

She nods, and he leaves, and then comes back a few seconds later with an electric monitor. He sits there, listening to the clicks and whirs as it takes a reading, then pulls off the cuff and pauses for a moment with his finger on her pulse, counting.

“Is it… okay?” The words are hard to form. She’s so unbelievably tired. Hugh nods.

“It’s fine. You’re fine. Don’t worry. Are you cold?”

She shakes her head. Her hands and feet still feel numb, but the trembling is subsiding, and she can feel the warmth from the hot water bottle seeping through her.

“Go to sleep,” Hugh says gently. “I’ll wake you in a few hours. Okay?”

“… kay,” she manages. And then she lets her eyes close, and slips into a merciful darkness.